Where open source hasn't won

A few years ago, we proclaimed that
"open source won."
That may
be true, but it's not exactly a battle cry. What do you do after
declaring victory? Go home and have a party, I suppose. Start up a
few would-be unicorns, or get a job at one of them.

What we didn't do was look seriously at what's not open. Open source
may have won, but it's a victory that was limited to programming
languages, databases, frameworks, and tools. That's a fairly small
part of the world. What else?

I'm not an open source purist; I don't think that all code wants to be
"free," either as in beer or as in liberty.
But I believe strongly that there are many areas where we need to
struggle for increased openness; if we don't, we'll pay a very high
price. So let's try to "think different" (as
Apple used to say).
Open
source has won, in at least some parts of the landscape, but what
battles still need to be fought?

Open data

In the last few years, we've made a lot of progress with
opening up data; but we need much more. Who is collecting your data,
and what are they doing with it? What data do governments hold that
should be released to the public? And, more important, what form is
it in? Open source advocates would laugh at a company whose "open
source" release consisted of a set of PDF files. In data, that's
all too common. We also need to ask what data should not be open:
what data is legitimately private.

Open data models

Cathy O'Neil has frequently argued for the importance of
open data models.
As our future becomes ever-more intertwined with "big data,"
we desperately need to know more about the models that are predicting
our actions, driving our economy, and policing our streets.

Open UI and UX

I made this one up; I don't really know what "open UI" means. But I've spent
plenty of time with open source desktop tools that have horrendous
user interfaces. Open source developers have never had a good handle on
UI design. UI design is hard, the biggest users of open source software
are typically other software developers, and software developers are
notoriously tolerant of bad UI. How do we engage UI designers in the open source process?
"Open" isn't just about source code.

Open source biology

Who owns your genome? What does that even mean? A gene
may be a piece of code (a sequence of letters) that could be subject
to a software license. But an
"open source gene"
makes little sense
without instructions about how to synthesize and deploy it. Open
source biology may be the most important issue facing us; it's also
the most complex, with a tangle of ethical, legal, and
practical issues.

Open hardware

In the past few years, we've seen plenty of interest in
publishing models for 3D printers online. And that's a small victory
for open source. But there's more. We won't get far with open
hardware if we don't also have
open protocols
so our open hardware can communicate. A bigger and nightmarish issue
facing the Internet of Things is billions of devices
that are difficult, or impossible, to update. These devices are
running out-of-date software, full of security vulnerabilities, and
they will still be online in 10 years, 20 years, maybe even 30 years. Many of these devices are running an open source operating
system, but few of them can (or will) be updated. The right to update
is one of the more important (though less discussed) implications of
open source. In the hardware world, that right is often
forgotten.

Open source may have won. But there's a lot more to "open" than
source. It's not time to start the party. And it's certainly not
time to rest on our collective laurels.

Mike Loukides is Vice President of Content Strategy for O'Reilly Media, Inc. He's edited many highly regarded books on technical subjects that don't involve Windows programming. He's particularly interested in programming languages, Unix and what passes for Unix these days, and system and network administration. Mike is the author of System Performance Tuning and a coauthor of Unix Power Tools. Most recently, he's been fooling around with data and data analysis, languages like R, Mathematica, and Octave, and thinking about how to make books soc...